I want to be honest about something the rewards-program blogs rarely say out loud: surveys, video-watching, and cashback portals are real, but the effective rate per hour is bad. We're talking $1 to $3 an hour for surveys, and a few percent back on shopping you were already doing. Anyone claiming meaningful income from MyPoints is either putting in forty hours a week or selling you a course.
That said, these programs have a place in a smart earning stack. They work for people who can't get approved for credit cards. They're useful for kids, students, retirees, or anyone who wants a few extra dollars without changing their behavior. So the question isn't whether to use them. It's which ones actually pay for the time you put in.
Here's how MyPoints, Swagbucks, Rakuten, Honey, and the rest stack against each other in 2026, with the honest math attached.
Quick Answer
Rakuten is the highest-yield cashback portal because it covers 3,500-plus stores and stacks with a credit card. Swagbucks is the best all-rounder if you're willing to do small tasks for $20 to $50 a month. MyPoints is the slower sibling of Swagbucks (same parent, Prodege). Fine if you already like it, not where I'd start. Honey took serious reputation damage in a late-2024 lawsuit alleging it hijacked affiliate commissions and surfaced inferior coupons, so I'd skip it. The real money here comes from credit card welcome bonuses, which routinely pay $500-plus for a single sign-up. That's more than most people earn from a year of survey-taking.
The Honest Effective Rate
Let me show you the math, because nobody else will.
Surveys and video-watching. Across MyPoints, Swagbucks, and InboxDollars (all Prodege-owned), the typical hourly rate for surveys is $1 to $3. Videos are worse, usually 30 cents to a dollar an hour, because the platform meters how many you can watch. Five hours a week gets you $20 to $60 a month. Lunch money for twenty hours of work.
Cashback portals. Better math, because you're not trading time. You're rerouting purchases you'd make anyway. A 3% to 6% cashback rate on a household that spends $400 a month online is $144 to $288 a year, on autopilot, with about ten seconds of effort per purchase.
Receipt-scanning and offer apps. Ibotta, Fluz, Drop, and the rest land between the extremes. $5 to $15 a month is typical if you're consistent.
The pattern: the closer a program is to rerouting money you were already going to spend, the better the yield. The closer it is to doing tasks for points, the worse the yield gets.
MyPoints: What It Actually Is and How It Earns
MyPoints has been around since 1996, one of the oldest survivors in this category. It's owned by Prodege, the same parent that runs Swagbucks and InboxDollars. The three programs share infrastructure: same survey routers, similar partner networks, similar redemption options. If you've used Swagbucks, MyPoints will feel familiar. If you've found Swagbucks slow, MyPoints will feel slower.
You earn points (4,000 Points is roughly $25 in gift cards as a typical conversion) through:
- Online shopping at 1,900-plus partner stores including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Macy's, Kohl's, Sephora, eBay, Expedia, and Groupon. Rates vary from 1 point per dollar up to 10x during promotional periods.
- Surveys, which are the main earning mechanic for most users
- Watching short videos, which is meter-limited
- Playing games and signing up for trial offers
- Reading promotional emails and clicking through to advertisers
Redemption is via gift cards (Amazon, Visa prepaid, Target, Walmart, dozens of others) or PayPal cash, with minimum thresholds usually around $5 to $25 depending on the option.
The honest take on MyPoints. It works. It pays. The mobile app is decent. But the portal coverage is narrower than Rakuten's, the survey yield matches Swagbucks', and the interface feels older. If I were starting fresh today, I wouldn't start here.
Swagbucks: The Versatile Sibling
Swagbucks is MyPoints' more popular cousin under the same parent. It has more activity types: Swagbucks search (a Bing-powered engine that pays small SB amounts), Swagbucks Live trivia, surveys, videos, cashback shopping, daily polls, and a referral program that pays 10% of your referrals' earnings forever.
The case for Swagbucks over MyPoints comes down to:
- A bigger active user base, so survey routing tends to find you eligible surveys faster
- More variety in earning activities (the search and trivia keep it from feeling like a survey grind)
- A $5 to $10 sign-up bonus that's usually live
- A redemption menu with faster gift-card processing
For casual users, $20 to $50 a month is realistic with steady-but-not-obsessive effort. Power users push that higher, but the time math gets ugly fast.
Swagbucks also has cashback shopping with the same partner network philosophy as Rakuten, but with smaller coverage and rates that are sometimes lower. I wouldn't use Swagbucks as my primary cashback portal. I'd use it for the side activities.
Rakuten: The Cashback Specialist (and the Amex Stacking Play)
Rakuten, formerly Ebates and now owned by Rakuten Inc., is the one program in this list I actively recommend.
It covers 3,500-plus stores, including the ones that matter: Macy's, Nordstrom, Sephora, Saks, Wayfair, Walmart, Best Buy, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Kohl's, Petco, and basically every major retailer with an affiliate program. Base rates run 1% to 10%. Promotional rates push to 12% to 15% on Double Cash Back days, which run several times a year and are worth waiting for on big purchases.
You visit Rakuten before you shop, click through to the retailer, and the cashback gets credited to your account. Payouts are quarterly via check or PayPal once your balance hits $5. The welcome bonus is typically $30 after your first $30 in purchases.
Here's the stacking play that turns Rakuten from "fine" into "actually worth caring about":
Rakuten has its own credit card, the Rakuten American Express Card, that earns 3x Rakuten Cash on Rakuten in-app and on-site purchases, 2x on dining and entertainment, and 1x everywhere else. When you shop through Rakuten with the Rakuten Amex card, you stack the portal cashback (say, 4%) with the 3x card earning. That stack lands you north of 7% effective cashback on retailers you were going to use anyway.
The stack gets better when you layer in Rakuten's seasonal Double Cash Back events. A 10% portal day plus the 3x Rakuten Amex card puts you over 13% back on a single transaction. That's not survey-money territory anymore.
Read that paragraph again. Rakuten by itself is okay. Rakuten plus the Rakuten Amex is the only program in this category where the math gets seriously interesting.
Honey: The 2024 Hijacking Concerns
I have to address this honestly, because most comparison articles still recommend Honey without mentioning what happened.
Honey was bought by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion. It's a browser extension that auto-finds and applies coupon codes at checkout, plus pays "Honey Gold" points for purchases made through its links.
In late 2024, Honey became the subject of a high-profile investigation and lawsuit alleging the extension was hijacking affiliate commissions: when you clicked an influencer's affiliate link, Honey was substituting its own tracking, taking the commission, and showing the original creator nothing. The lawsuit also alleged Honey systematically surfaced inferior coupon codes to users, even when better codes existed, because retailers paid Honey to feature specific codes.
PayPal and Honey have disputed these allegations, but the reputational damage is real. Multiple major creators publicly dropped Honey partnerships, and the broader points community treats it with significant skepticism now.
My take: there are better tools for finding coupon codes (Capital One Shopping, Slickdeals, RetailMeNot, or just checking the retailer's deals page), and the cashback yield through Honey was always weak. No reason to use Honey in 2026.
Other Programs Worth Knowing
Capital One Shopping (formerly Wikibuy) is a free browser extension that does what Honey claimed to do: finds coupon codes, compares prices, and pays cashback on partner purchases. You don't need to be a Capital One cardholder. Cashback yield is modest, but the price comparison has real utility.
Ibotta is a receipt-scanning app for grocery, household goods, and beauty. Browse offers, buy the items, scan your receipt, get cashback credited. Yields run $5 to $25 a month for casual users. The Ibotta browser extension also covers online shopping at 1,500-plus stores.
DOSH is a card-linked offer app. Link a card, earn automatic cashback when you use it at participating merchants. No receipts to scan. Smaller merchant network than Ibotta, but zero friction. Worth running in the background.
Fluz and Drop are smaller players in the same category. I wouldn't make either my primary, but they don't conflict if you want to layer them in.
Shopkick was once interesting (scan barcodes in stores to earn points), but the offer quality and yield have declined sharply since 2020. Skip it.
The Real Stack Ranking by Yield
If you ranked these programs purely by dollars earned per hour of effort, here's how the list shakes out:
- Rakuten plus Rakuten Amex card. Best yield in the category, stacks cleanly, $200 to $500-plus per year possible for a typical online-shopping household.
- Rakuten alone. Solid by itself, especially during Double Cash Back events.
- Swagbucks. Best of the survey and activity programs for casual earners.
- Ibotta plus DOSH running in the background. Low-effort grocery and dining cashback.
- Capital One Shopping. Utility from price comparison, modest cashback bonus.
- MyPoints. Fine if you're already there, not where I'd start.
- Honey. Skip.
- Shopkick, Fluz, Drop. Only if you've maxed the rest.
When These Programs Are Actually Worth Your Time
A specific reader profile where these programs make complete sense:
- You can't get approved for credit cards. New to credit, recovering credit, student visa, whatever the reason. Rewards programs don't require a credit pull.
- You're under 18. Same reason. Teens earning gift cards on Swagbucks is a legitimate use case.
- You're already a heavy online shopper. Rakuten especially is leaving money on the table if you shop online and don't use it.
- You have downtime you can't otherwise monetize. Waiting in line, watching TV one-handed, killing time at the airport. Swagbucks activities can absorb that time.
- You're chasing a specific short-term goal. "$150 in Amazon gift cards for the holidays" is achievable on Swagbucks in a couple months.
If you fit one of these profiles, pick the right tool (usually Rakuten for shopping, Swagbucks for activities) and use it deliberately.
When They're Not (Credit Card Welcome Bonuses Crush Them)
Here's the conversation I have with friends who get excited about Swagbucks earnings.
A typical credit card welcome bonus pays $300 to $500 for a $3,000 to $4,000 spend over three months on a no-annual-fee or low-annual-fee card. The math:
- $500 welcome bonus
- Earned over 90 days of spending you'd do anyway
- Effective effort: maybe two hours total (application, paying bills with the card, paying the statement)
- Effective rate: $250 per hour of effort
Compare that to surveys at $1 to $3 an hour. The welcome bonus is 80x to 250x more valuable per hour spent. It's not even close.
The Chase Sapphire Preferred, the American Express Gold, and the Capital One Venture line all routinely have 60,000 to 100,000 point welcome bonuses worth $600 to $1,500 in travel redemptions. That's the actual money in this hobby.
The portal side (Rakuten and friends) is different. That's pure incremental yield on existing behavior, not a time trade. I'd still run Rakuten alongside a credit card stack. But the survey side competes directly with welcome bonus earning, and it loses every time.
Common Mistakes
Treating rewards programs like a job. Spending five hours a day on surveys for $50 a week is a mathematical disaster. If your time is worth anything, you're losing money.
Not stacking the portal with a card. Shop through Rakuten with a 1% cashback card and you're at 4% total. Shop through Rakuten with a 3x card on that category and you're closer to 7%. The card layer is half the yield.
Forgetting about quarterly minimums. Rakuten pays quarterly with a $5 minimum. Some users let small balances expire by abandoning accounts. Set a calendar reminder.
Letting points sit instead of redeeming. MyPoints and Swagbucks points don't appreciate. Redeem on a regular cadence (quarterly is fine) so you're not exposed to program changes or devaluations.
Using Honey out of habit. Covered above. Better tools exist.
Skipping welcome bonuses because the spend requirement feels intimidating. A $3,000 three-month spend feels big until you realize you already spend that on rent or utilities via a card-payable bill. The bonus is sitting there.
What I'd Actually Do
If a friend asked where to start, here's what I'd say.
Step one: get Rakuten and use it every time you shop online. Two-second click-through, automatic cashback, no friction. Do this and nothing else from this list and you'll see meaningful money over a year.
Step two: if you qualify for a credit card, get the Rakuten American Express card and stack it on top of Rakuten purchases. This is the highest-yield play in the entire rewards-program category. The math compounds.
Step three: if you want a small side-earning habit, install Swagbucks. Use it for activities you'd otherwise do passively, like search or occasional surveys when you're killing time. Don't make it a job.
Step four: run Ibotta and DOSH in the background. Low effort, modest yield, no reason not to.
Step five, the most important one: if you can get approved for credit cards, treat welcome bonus earning as your primary rewards strategy. A single Chase Sapphire Preferred welcome bonus is worth more in cash terms than most people earn from a year of surveys. The points stack on top of the cashback you're earning from the portal moves above. That's the actual game.
Honest summary: portal cashback is a worthwhile autopilot, surveys are a slow trickle for people without other options, and credit card welcome bonuses are where the real money lives. Plan accordingly.
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